12: True West
Interview with Bob “Boze” Bell, Editor, May 2007
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
This installment of Periodical Radio is about True West, a glossy magazine dedicated to preserving the American West. Heavily illustrated and with many advertisements, True West has stories about the history of the West, current events in historic preservation, news about collecting artwork, guns, and other memorabilia, and reviews of books and films. The advertisements complement the magazine’s themes, being focused on life and leisure in the West, art and collectables, and vacation opportunities.
True West is published 11 times a year, including an annual Special Source Book issue. Each issue runs about 100 pages, sometimes more, and costs $5.99 at bookstores. The writing style is informal. The magazine strives for historical accuracy, but lets its authors express their opinions.
My guest is Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West. Bob has a colorful history and an interesting story about how he came to run the magazine. I’ll let him tell the story in his own words.
Steve: Bob Boze Bell, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Bob: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Steve: First, please share with our listeners how you came to be executive editor of True West.
Bob: Well that’s a long bloody story, but the short Cliffs Notes version is that this is a magazine I read as a kid growing up in Kingman, Arizona in the 1950’s and I always would see it when I was in college and elsewhere and thought, “Man, I could do something with that magazine if I ever had the chance.” And in 1999 they were up for sale and two crazy friends of mine and I bought it in Stillwater, Oklahoma and took it to Cave Creek, Arizona, and it’s been here for the last 8 years.
Steve: Tell us about Joe Small, and what the magazine was like in its early years.
Bob: Well Joe Small was a really entrepreneurial guy. After World War II he started doing magazines out of his living room in Austin, Texas. He kept wanting to do sportsman type publications, and he’d get them printed and he would sell all the ads and his wife helped him. Then one time in one of the sporting magazines he ran a letter about an outlaw, and he just got a ton of mail on it, and he thought, “You know what, I wonder if this could support a real magazine?” At that time, you know, there was True Magazine, True Detective, that kind of thing. So he came up with the title True West, and the first one was launched in 1953. All of a sudden he just really hit the jackpot, because westerns at the same time were proliferating on TV, and people like myself wanted to know, “Well, how much of this is true?” So by the early 1960’s he had hit a circulation of about 250,000 off newsstand, which is just outrageous.
Steve: So the main theme of the magazine was comparing what people were seeing in other media with the historical record?
Bob: Well that was, I would say, the cornerstone of the enterprise. There was just a hunger for well, how much of this Wyatt Earp TV show is actually real? So month after month he told the true stories, and that’s what really attracted me, and I was just a huge fan of this magazine as a nine year old boy.
Steve: I see. What counts as “The West”? Anything west of the Mississippi?
Bob: Well no, you know, that’s a funny . . . it’s a good question actually, and we argue about this constantly here at the magazine because it’s constantly shifting. If you’d asked that question in 1900, you know it would have been probably along the lines of the actual borders of the United States, but now you have to deal with Alaska, and the Alaska gold rush, and a lot of the West took place in Mexico. So you really need to go deep down in there. Then the biggest phenom is that as the 20th century developed, certain towns that were wild in their heyday have lost their panache as an Old West name. Probably the best example is Los Angeles. Los Angeles was a huge wild, wild place in the 1850’s, but who’s going to go see a movie, and say “Let’s ride over to Los Angeles?” You know, the modern city usurps the original meaning. As the century has gone on, there are these anomalies, these strange exceptions. For example, Phoenix doesn’t work, because it’s too industrial now, and too modern, but somehow Tucson still works. When we get into Texas, Fort Worth works, even though it’s a large place, but Houston is too space oriented. So if a cowboy in a western were to say “Let’s ride over to Houston,” that doesn’t work. It really gets dicey up north. Aspen, Colorado, that’s not gonna work, but yet Cripple Creek still works. Then up in the Northwest they have real problems because “Hey, let’s mosey over to Seattle”--it just doesn’t work. So you end up with these kind of pockets of what the imagination of the West entails and we’re all about that.
Steve: It sounds like the time period is essentially the Civil War until 1900 or so?
Bob: Well even that’s moving. It’s very . . . history’s very fluid. I like to say nothing changes more than the past. Nothing changes more than history, because what we believed about Wyatt Earp ten years ago is not true today, because someone discovered that Wyatt Earp was in a whorehouse in 1872 rather than actually hunting buffalo like he said he was.
Steve: Here I am in Albany, NY, and at one point in United States history this was the West.
Bob: Exactly, and so it’s constantly moving. The time period is moving. Now think about this: when I was kid, the real Old West was about 50 years before me, and now we’re at a stage where fans of history, they put as much importance on where John Wayne filmed The Searchers in Momument Valley as they do on Picacho Peak, the Civil War battle. It was 50 years ago when The Searchers was filmed, so that’s bringing on its own historic importance, the fact that movies were filmed at a certain place, and that’s a new phenom.
Steve: Art work is an important component of True West, both in the illustrations and in feature stories about the market for western art. How does art enhance appreciation for and understanding of the American West?
Bob: Well for me it’s everything. I kind of got started in this field because I got sent to detention in high school. I was a big yacker and talker, talking in class, and the teachers would get exasperated with me, and believe it or not they sent me to the library. I would be in the library, and I didn’t want to study or anything, but I’d get bored and so I went over and started looking at books. I saw these books on the Civil War, and of course Matthew Brady became an instant hero to me, because I could actually look at something that was illustrated, in this case a photograph, and I thought, “Man, those were actually dead people at Gettysburg.” I was just hooked. Then when I would read True West magazine, you’d actually see the photos. Then I became enamored of Charlie Russell, and Frederick Remington, both icons of the West, and excellent illustrators, and they became my heroes. So when I started my tenure here at True West I had three goals: One is the best photographs we can find, scanned from the originals, not the third or fourth, tenth generation photos. I also wanted really good maps, and I wanted really good illustrations. Fortunately I’m an illustrator so we get a cheap product there because I end up doing a lot of the stuff, but not out of ego. I’d love to get some more artists in there, but usually out of just budget.
Steve: An iconic image of the West is the gunfight, and guns and gun fighting get ample coverage in True West. How dangerous really was it to live in the Wild West?
Bob: That’s a very good question, and another topic that we argue about constantly here, and our readers do, too. I’ve seen statistical studies that show that Tombstone was not very dangerous at all, and if you extrapolate out the homicides and stuff it was really quite tame. But there’s an old saying that there’s lies, there’s damn lies, and there’s statistics. You know, these towns were violent. When violence happened, it was extremely violent. It was probably more violent between the towns. If you were out traveling, everyone out west went armed, because there were so many classes of robbers and just hatred, racial hatred, that it was a dangerous place to be. The towns, even though Tombstone has a lot of legend to it, it probably wasn’t that dangerous, in the broad picture. In fact, Wyatt Earp was interviewed in 1924 in a state case in Los Angeles and the attorney was kind of trying to suck up to him, and he said, “Hey, you were a marshal way back in the wild days at Tombstone, when it was a really rough place,” and Wyatt Earp said, and I quote, “Not half as bad as L.A.” He lived in L.A. at the time. I felt, well that’s funny, here’s a guy that thinks it’s more dangerous in L.A. than it was in Tombstone.
Steve: What about the other dangers of life at the time and place, other than violence among people?
Bob: Well the thing I think really strikes a chord in all humanity, and why the Old West story is so universal is, when you were out west and you broke your leg, and you’re out in the middle of nowhere, that was it. There was no 911, there was no air evac[uation] helicopters. The stories of courage about people . . .. There was a young girl who was in a wagon train, I believe it was in Wyoming, and her father and several brothers went out hunting and they didn’t come back. Then more people went to look for them, and she ended up being the only person there, and the other people never came back. She was there all alone, and then it snowed, and she tried to survive and finally I believe some native Americans came along and actually took her to safety. But what an incredible story! And they never found the people, they never found her family. So what an incredible mystery. What happened to them? How did they all die? But she was left alone and she survived. Now those are great stories.
Steve: Many stories must be lost because I get the impression from your magazine and other things I’ve read that there’s not a lot of written records, that many activities were never recorded. Is that correct?
Bob: Well, it’s about half correct. A lot of things weren’t recorded, or [rather] we didn’t know they were recorded. For example, take the Lincoln County War, the Billy the Kid story. When he started to rise in fame in the 1920’s, there didn’t seem to be a lot of written information, but then as time went on, in 1950 an Englishman named Frederick Nolan went to the movies and saw Johnny McBrown, I believe, as Billy the Kid, and was really enamored that there was an Englishman in this story. He called up on the telephone in London and found the Tunstall family, and come to find out they had John Tunstall’s diary, and come to find out John Tunstall wrote down every day of his life, everything that he did. So that was published in 1950. Then about in 1960, turns out there was the Angel report, it was in the Smithsonian, and it interviewed Billy the Kid, and all these people about the killing of Tunstall, and on it goes. People keep finding all these reports. So there were really a lot of reports done, things in some cases almost too much. You know it’s confusing when we go through the Custer inquiries, and the Reno Court of court-martial papers, and the OK Corral, there’s all these conflicting reports. I used to believe as a kid if I just found the right paper, the truth would come out. But what happens is it’s more like peeling an onion, the further down you go, the more you start crying.
Steve: The True West web site claims that the magazine is bold and sometimes controversial. Can you share an example or two of things that you’ve published that have stirred controversy?
Bob: Well we’ve tackled them all. I mentioned earlier that we had an article on “Was Wyatt Earp a Pimp?” You know, a guy was looking in Peoria, Illinois, was looking for genealogy, on microfiche. He was looking and all of a sudden he found this newspaper item in 1872 that Wyatt Earp was arrested in a bagnio, which is a floating bordello. At first Earp lovers said “Oh, no, it was probably another Wyatt Earp.” Then they found another article that Wyatt was arrested with his brother Morgan and that Wyatt was an old offender. Then researchers descended on Peoria, Illinois and discovered that Wyatt Earp was living in the whorehouse. So an article on “Was Wyatt Earp a Pimp?”, you can imagine, upset quite a few people. But we thought the question had to be asked. We’ve also done on Brokeback Mountain, we did [an article on] is America ready for a gay western, and titled it “Homos on the Range,” question mark. We’ve also done religion in the West, which is very controversial, and we feel that religion has gotten short shrift in the story. It’s usually mocked or made fun of, because we really want our towns to be wild and untamed, but the fact of the matter is that the pecking order of the towns kind of goes like this: first the men show up, and it’s a no holds barred world, and they’re armed and they kill each other to try to carve out territory. Then the whores and the gamblers come and shake down the first group, and then the third wave is the wives who come along and bring religion and order and the town settles down. Now you can apply that, ironically, to any frontier, including the internet.
Steve: Interesting. True West is not indexed in the databases our history students use to find articles when they’re writing a history paper. Do you think it should be?
Bob: Well that was a question our founder, Joe Small, wrestled with early on. But he finally made a distinction, and I agree with him. We’re popular history. We’re not for the footnote crowd, and if we’re going to err, we’re going to err on the side of popular reading. We want this to be accessible to everyone, as many people as possible, and there are plenty of places where people can get indexing or footnoting, but we’re not one of them.
Steve: The advertisements in True West complement the magazine’s theme. Do you refuse advertising from companies selling unrelated goods and services?
Bob: The short answer is no. But we’ve been very lucky. We’ve managed to corral, which is an apt metaphor, people who are compatible to our look and feel of the magazine. One of the biggest things I try to protect is, when you’re in the magazine, you don’t want to leave that fantasy. I don’t want to… I hated the old Gene Autry movies where Gene rode in a car and jumped off the running boards onto a wagon. I hated those. I think the car busts the bubble, the fantasy. So I really try to protect that image, the fantasy that you stay in that moment. When you go to that world you want to be in there, and you don’t want to see ads for hearing aids or lawn mowers. Part of that is a function of we haven’t gotten many ads like that to deal with. But we’re blessed by the fact that everybody in the magazine is living that fantasy.
Steve: How important is advertising revenue for the survival of True West?
Bob: I can’t overestimate it. Really all of our eggs are in that basket. That makes me nervous sometimes, because we really depend on the advertising to survive, and that was a real critical lesson that I learned early on. We were losing thirty thousand dollars a month when I bought the magazine. And man that’ll wake you up. As a cartoonist, and an artist, and a rebel, and underground drummer, that was a frightening moment, and I had to learn very quickly what it is that was going to float this boat. It quickly became evident that we had to have good advertising staff. It took me many years, but we have a crack team now. Trish Brink is leading that charge along with Seth Hoyt, Joel Klasky, and Sue Lambert, and they’re just excellent. They are the bedrock of our financial stability.
Steve: Do you have a significant audience overseas, Europeans for instance?
Bob: I wish we did. We don’t. I have to be honest with you. I’ve heard ever since I took this over, I keep hearing, oh, the Germans love the Old West, the Japanese, you need to be over there, the English they love it, the Finns, you name it, I’ve heard it. But every time we’ve made an effort, the shipping is just prohibitive. We just can’t get it over there without losing money, and so it hasn’t been a priority. With the web now, we are starting to get more action from just really bizarre places, New Zealand for example.
Steve: Your headquarters are adjacent to Frontier Town in Cave Creek, Arizona. Does your location influence the magazine’s content?
Bob: Hopefully it does. That’s one of the reasons we brought it here, we really wanted to have a western home. The magazine bounced around the Midwest in the 70’s and 80’s, and was in Wisconsin for a short period. Although they tried really hard, I just think the magazine really got kind of watered down at that point. They had recipes, and it kind of had a Midwestern flavor. One of the things I really wanted to bring to the magazine is a really hard core, edgy western feeling and you can’t do that, I don’t believe, in the Midwest. For example, I’m sitting here right now looking out a window at a palo verde tree, ten saguaros, and a bunch of quail, rabbits that are running around. We’ve seen javalina, which are native pigs here, and deer and everything out this back window. I think that somehow seeps into the magazine.
Steve: One of the themes of the magazine, one of the topic areas, is historic preservation. The population of Arizona has really exploded. What’s being lost amid all the growth?
Bob: Well, a lot of stuff is being lost, daily almost. As we become a world class state it, it’s just incredible. They’re predicting now that it’s going to be urban all the way from Chino Valley in the North all the way to Sierra Vista in the south. That encompasses all the way through Prescott, all the way through Sedona, all the way to Phoenix, all the way to Tucson, and almost to the border. That’s just going to be one urban core, and I believe the papers said there’s only 15 miles in that entire swath that’s not scheduled development in the next 10 years. That’s a frightening development for people like myself who moved here in the 1950’s when the state was wide open. You could be out on the road and you couldn’t see a house in any direction. Those days are really almost gone now. There are very few places where you can’t see housing tracts, or some sort of Taco Bell, or just some franchise thing. As that Old West evaporates, you’ve got to be careful. You have to save something, and that really became our goal the last several years. You know, I don’t care what you save, but please save something.
Steve: Is True West Publishing partnering with any other organizations to help preserve history?
Bob: We actually are, and we’re seeking out more organizations. We work very closely with Western History Association and also Western Writers of America. Paul Hutton, distinguished professor at the University of New Mexico, is one of our contributing editors and helps us be in touch. Also Vince Murray down at the Arizona Historical Society, and Bruce Dinges. We seek out anybody, partnerships with anybody who’s trying to preserve the West, because we all have to work together, because if we don’t work together, who will?
Steve: Do you look forward to continuing to run True West? Is it worth it to you? It must be an awful lot of work.
Bob: You know, it is, and also, just again to be brutally honest, there are days I wake up and go, “What the heck am I doing? I’m a cartoonist, I’m the CEO of a company, this isn’t gonna work!” But most of the time, I come to work like today, I look up, I see “True West magazine since 1953” on the roof of the True West building, I walk inside, I’ve got a great staff, and I really come down to the bottom line, which is work is only work if you’d rather be somewhere else. And I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’m right where I want to be.
Steve: What are the greatest challenges of the job?
Bob: My biggest challenge is circulation, because we have a tsunami on our hands here with the internet. Magazines across the board are suffering. Newsstand [sales] decline because people are spending more and more time online, for example, listening to this interview. I know a therapist who told me that one of the biggest problems now in couples is they come in and they say “My husband sits on the couch and he watches TV and then during the commercials he has the laptop and he surfs the web.” This is a new problem in marital relationships, and I’m going, you know, they’re not picking up a magazine, they’re surfing the web.
Steve: Do you see a future for True West as a web product?
Bob: Yes, I do. In fact, we’re developing a new web site even as we speak, and we’re going to have much more of a dynamic site, and it is the future of the world, really, don’t you think?
Steve: Perhaps. We serials librarians do discuss that a great deal. There are a number of people who do still want a print product in their hands. But I . . . it’s very hard to predict which way things will go.
Bob: Well we still believe in our core business, which is the magazine, and we don’t plan on stopping that. I’m a print junkie, and I love magazines, I still love newspapers. But it is going to drastically change the landscape, and Bob Brink, who’s our consultant who ran Hearst for 26 years, he constantly reminds us that no new media has ever killed an old medium. They said that TV would kill radio, they said radio would kill newspapers, they said videotapes would kill movies, and none of that’s been true. It’s just created a new avenue of platforms for dispensing media. We’ve got to learn, though, to survive in this dense field of competition, and that’s our biggest challenge.
Steve: Bob Boze Bell, is there anything else that you’d like to add that we haven’t discussed?
Bob: Well, I wish anybody listening would check us out at twmag.com, and if they know of anybody--I really want to get youth involved--if people know nephews or sons or daughters who they think might be interested in history, it would be great if they would send them a subscription, get them involved in history. This is a fun way to do that. Hopefully that will send them to the library.
Steve: Very well. Bob Boze Bell, thank you very much for being my guest on Periodical Radio.
Bob: My pleasure.
Steve: To subscribe to True West magazine, call 888-687-1881, or go on the web to twmag.com. A one year subscription is $29.95. Thank you for listening to this installment of Periodical Radio. I'm your host, Steve Black.